On Tuesday 29 August 2006 21:07, Daniel Noll wrote: > > I just got an idea: Why not use DHCP for this? It can already be used to > > discover your default IRC server (8.19 in RFC-2132), so why not your > > default XMPP server? > > We already have another way to do it too, DNS Service Discovery.
That's true. For those not in the know, DNS-SD lets you query a domain for a list of services. DNS-SD is commonly used in conjunction with Multicast DNS to scan the local network for services, but DNS-SD can also be used with regular DNS. DNS-SD is essentially one more layer above SRV. Instead of asking for "the Jabber server at example.com" (with SRV), you ask for "Jabber servers at example.com" (with a specially encoded PTR query). This results in a list of friendly, user-readable names (not hostnames!). Then you can SRV resolve any of the names. The idea is that a user can browse his domain, see a list of named services, and then pick one. For example, browsing a domain for ftp servers might result in "Joe's Shared FTP" and "Mike's Vault". However, this is really only useful if you plan to have more than one Jabber server in a given domain, and you want a friendly way for the user to pick the right one. For Hal's purposes, SRV alone is probably enough. -Justin
